In The Revenant, a period drama reaching for tragedy, Leonardo DiCaprio plays the mountain man Hugh Glass, a figure straight out of American myth and history. He enters dressed in a greasy, fur-trimmed coat, holding a flintlock rifle while stealing through a forest primeval that Longfellow might have recognized. This, though, is no Arcadia; it’s 1823 in the Great Plains, a pitiless testing ground for men that’s littered with the vivid red carcasses of skinned animals, ghastly portents of another slaughter shortly to come. The setting could not be more striking or the men more flinty.
The Revenant is an American foundation story, by turns soaring and overblown. Directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu( Birdman, Babel), it features a battalion of very fine, hardworking actors, none more diligently committed than DiCaprio, and some of the most beautiful natural tableaus you’re likely to see in a movie this year. Partly shot in outwardly unspoiled tracts in Canada and Argentina, it has the brilliant, crystalline look that high-definition digital can provide, with natural vistas that seem to go on forever and suggest the seeming limitless bounty that once was. Here, green lichen carpets trees that look tall enough to pierce the heavens. It’s that kind of movie, with that kind of visual splendor - it spurs you to match its industrious poeticism.
If you’re familiar with Inarritu’s work, you know paradise is generally short-lived, and here arrows and bullets are soon flying, bodies are falling and the muddy banks of a riverside camp are a gory churn. Glass, part of a commercial fur expedition, escapes with others on a boat and sails into an adventure that takes him through a crucible of suffering - including a near-fatal grizzly attack - that evokes by turns classics of American literature and a Perils of Pauline-style silent-film serial. Left for dead by two companions, Glass crawls out of a shallow grave and toward the men who abandoned him. It’s a narrative turn that suggests he, like so many before him, is one of D.H. Lawrence’s essential American souls: hard, isolate, stoic and a killer.
The movie is partly based on The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge, a 2002 historical adventure by Michael Punke inspired by the real Hugh Glass. In 1823, Glass signed on with the Rocky Mountain Fur Company for an expedition on the upper Missouri River that almost did him in when Arikara Indians attacked the group and, sometime later, he was mauled by a grizzly sow that may have been protecting her cubs. The bear should have killed Glass. Instead, its failure to do so - along with Glass’ frontier skills, some help from strangers and the indestructible romance of the American West - turned him into a mountain man legend and the inspiration for various accounts, including a book-length poem and a 1971 film, Man in the Wilderness.
The historical Glass was somewhat of a question mark, which makes him a spacious vessel for interpretation. Inarritu, who wrote the script with Mark L. Smith, fills that vessel to near overflowing, specifically by amplifying Glass with a vague, gauzily romantic past life with an unnamed Pawnee wife( Grace Dove) seen in elliptical flashback. By the time the movie opens, the wife is long dead, having been murdered by white troops, and Glass’ son, Hawk( Forrest Goodluck), has become his close companion. The son’s name evokes James Fenimore Cooper’s Hawk-eye( The Last of the Mohicans), and together Glass and Hawk create an intimate, familial bulwark - and a multicultural father-and-son dyad - in a wilderness teeming with assorted savages.
Who exactly the savage is here is never much of an issue; as a sign scrawled in French spells out in one scene, everyone is. Inarritu likes big themes, but he isn’t given to subtlety. There’s a shocker of an image, for instance, in Amores Perros, his feature debut, which expresses his talent for finding the indelible cinematic shot, the one you can’t look away from even when you want to, and